The bullying of academics follows a pattern of horrendous, Orwellian elimination rituals, often hidden from the public. Despite the anti-bullying policies (often token), bullying is rife across campuses, and the victims (targets) often pay a heavy price.
"Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci - "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men [or good women] do nothing." Edmund Burke

February 26, 2013

X was a Lecturer at the Y Department of the University of Ulster. In 2007 he took the University of Ulster to the Northern Ireland Tribunals for unfair dismissal and won the case.

The statement above is fairly innocuous. Academics are dismissed all the time in UK, and probably more often at the University of Ulster. Nothing special. But this time the University of Ulster had a bit surprise: it lost the case. Not only that, the tribunal Chairperson had a very strong comment about Mr. Ronnie Magee, the Director of Human Resources:

“… The reasons advanced by Mr. Magee for not following a proper redundancy procedure are simply breathtaking in their arrogance and inadequacy…”

Wow, somewhat a bit too strong a criticism! Now, wasn’t Prof. Gerry McKenna accused for similar reasons as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ulster and needed to go? Then how come Mr. Magee is still adorning the University of Ulster as the Director of Human Resources?
Any guess?

The X verdict can be found openly in the web but many other cases against the University of Ulster may not have come to day light in the fear of losing a chance of future employment. It will be interesting to trace and document them.

February 21, 2013

...The Ottawa administration's decision to fire
Rancourt, imposing on him the "capital punishment" of labor relations,
was even more vigorously opposed than were the lesser punishments dealt to him
in preceding years. In a factual, reasoned letterto the Board of Governors dated 5 January 2009, Rancourt defended himself.
Well over a hundred professors and students from Ottawa and elsewhere sent individual
letters
protesting Rancourt's elimination. Even before the axe fell, the
Canadian Association of University Teachers had appointed a three-person Committee
of Inquiry to investigate the long series of run-ins, dating back
at least to the fall of 2005, between the Ottawa administration and Rancourt.

Is this a case of workplace mobbing in academe?
Yes — and more precisely, administrative mobbing. (Click herefor the standard checklist of indicators, here
for the mainpage of the relevant website, and here
for a short, basic article.)

What allows so unqualified a diagnosis is that
Rancourt has made comprehensive documentation on the conflict (letters, emails,
press reports, videos) publicly available on his blog
and at academicfreedom.ca.
For want of adequate information pro and con about a professor's dismissal or
humiliation, it is often impossible to make more than a tentative assessment
of whether it is a case of mobbing or merely a hard but measured and warranted
response to some betrayal of academic purpose. In this case, Rancourt has laid
bare to the public the actions that got him into trouble, the sanctions imposed,
and what is most important, documentary evidence of both his own and his adversaries'
views. Thereby he has bolstered his own credibility. Let other aggrieved academics
take a lesson: only in so far as full information is publicly available, the
cards all on the table, can outside observers make confident judgments and say
things worth listening to.

It is plain from the material online that over
time, administrators at Ottawa coalesced in the view that Rancourt, despite
his stellar research record and the respect given him by very many students,
is an utterly unworthy and abhorrent man, fit only for expulsion from respectable
academic company. While administrators appear front and centre in this mobbing
case, they are joined by dozens, even hundreds of students and faculty who are
after Rancourt's neck. According to Karen Pinchin's trenchant article
in Maclean's, "nearly one-third of Rancourt’s colleagues
at the school have signed a petition of complaint against him." (Click
here
to read the petition, unambiguous evidence of ganging up.) Even distant pundits
like Stanley
Fishand Margaret
Soltanpiled on.

An email
from Chemistry Chair Alain St-Amant is telling. Shortly after Rancourt's suspension,
with his dismissal pending, St-Amant apparently agreed to debate him on a TV
talk show, but then cancelled out. Rancourt sent him an email asking why, and
suggesting that administrative or peer pressure was the reason. St-Amant emailed
back, "I refuse to enter a battle of wits with an unarmed man. ... This
will be the last you will hear from me on this matter. Enjoy the paycheques
while they last." The contempt in these sentences is total. With a clever
turn of phrase, St-Amant gives Rancourt the ultimate academic insult, that he
has no wits, that is to say no intelligence. Then he cuts off communication
and gloats that Rancourt will soon be off the payroll. St-Amant would not likely
have felt free to send such a message had he not felt himself part of a campus
crowd united by scorn for Rancourt.

From the available documents, Rancourt appears
to exemplify a type of professor I described in my first
bookon academic mobbing, a professor I called "Dr. PITA"
— acronym for pain-in-the-ass, or in politer terms, a thorn
in administrators' sides, the one who makes them see red. Being a team player
is not Dr. PITA's priority. Administrative demands that most professors comply
with uncomplainingly are occasions for Dr. PITA to raise questions — and
more questions.

Real-life professors can become Dr. PITA for
any number of reasons. Administrators usually chalk it up to a personality defect.
The documentary record suggests that the reason in Rancourt's case, as in many
mobbing cases I have studied, is that he has thought deeply enough about education
and the search for truth, to realize how much these noble purposes are subverted
by the academic structures established to serve them.

...Awareness of this
downside of institutionalization is a common theme of the varied authors Rancourt
cites in support of his own brand of anarchism — Paolo Freire, Noam Chomsky,
Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, Ward Churchill, among others.

It was apparently Rancourt's deepening understanding
of and commitment to what learning actually involves, that led him to refuse
to rank and grade his students in the established, expected way. Since grading
is central to the institutionalization of learning, he felt obliged to renounce
it. This was the sticking point, the offense that became the main official reason
for his termination. As Rancourt plaintively wrote in his letter
to the Board, "Socrates did not give grades to his students."

...More often, however, administrators and colleagues
find ways to accommodate, sometimes even to honor and reward, the brilliant,
unusually effective researcher and teacher whose process of growth has led to
reluctance to give grades. Three professors of this kind have written letters
of support for Rancourt: John
McMurtry, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of
Guelph, John
Southin, retired Professor of Biology at McGill University, and
David
Noble, Professor of Social and Political Thought at York University.
These respected academics report that their universities managed to put up with
them for decades, albeit sometimes grudgingly, despite their own dissent from
conventional systems of student grading.

...Why do some university administrations mobilize
collective resources to eliminate professors of the Dr. PITA type, professors
like Rancourt or McMurtry or Illich, while others somehow make room for them?
One key difference is whether the administrators, despite all the bureaucratic
pressures upon them, continue to have a feel for what searching for truth actually
means. If they still hear that search as a personal call, they cannot bring
themselves to demonize, harass, and try to get rid of one who embodies truth-seeking
in a pristine way, despite the administrative challenges such a professor poses.
They are able to recognize in Dr. PITA not just bothersomeness and impracticality
but successful engagement with inquiry and learning, the fundamental goals of
a university...

On the other hand, to the extent a university's
administrators are of a purely managerial or technocratic frame of mind, they
lose sight of the institution's basic purposes and see a professor like Rancourt
as nothing more than sand in the gears of the bureaucracy. They react with rigidity,
threats, and punishment instead of dialogue... The
administrators and their minions begin circling the wagons against the targeted
professor, as if he or she were an invading army and the embodiment of wickedness.
Compliant and afraid, many faculty and students join the circle. Energies that
could be devoted to some kind of search for truth are expended instead on keeping
a genuine, successful searcher outside the embattled circle of imagined rectitude.

...One of the things about Denis Rancourt that has
led me to pick his case — out of the very many that come to my attention
— for commentary here is his impolitic tenacity in telling the truth as
he sees it. As if his troubles with the Ottawa administration over the grading
issue were not enough, he committed the further transgression of allying
himself with the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
— in defiance of President Rock's well-known sympathies. While drawing
inspiration from Noam Chomsky, Rancourt has
upbraided Chomskyfor not being brave enough and serving power
too much. And despite drawing much of his support from the left, Rancourt nonetheless
published in 2007, an insightful, scientifically informed
critique of one of the left's main priorities, the alleged threat
of global warming. Here is a man with little more prudence than the storied
boy who said aloud that the emperor has no clothes. Any half-way decent educator
has to feel admiration for Rancourt and to be glad that Claude
Lamontagne and several dozen other professors
and students at Ottawa have gone on record as opposing Rancourt's
banishment.

The campaign against Denis Rancourt reflects
badly on the University of Ottawa, but few professors can accurately say nothing
similar has lately happened in their own academic homes. On the whole, Ottawa
is not likely a worse educational institution than most others across the continent.
We live in what KC Johnson has called, in a 2009 essay
in Minding the Campus, "an era of academic mobbing." Some
mobbings arise from the left, others from the right, very many from plain intolerance
of a skilled truth-seeker with an independent mind. An era of greater devotion
to the classic goal of seeking truth is worth working toward.

Join the Bullied Academics Yahoo Group

Useful and informative Links

• Bad Apple Bullies - If you work as a teacher in Queensland, a Bad Apple Bully principal can destroy your health and your career with malicious gossip and secret sticky-notes.

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• Bully Online - Those who can, do. Those who can't, bully. Bully OnLine is the world's leading web site on workplace bullying and related issues which validates the experience of workplace bullying and provides confirmation, reassurance and re-empowerment.

• Suppression of dissent - The general field of "suppression of dissent" includes whistleblowing, free speech, systems of social control and related topics. The purpose of the site is to foster examination of these issues and action against suppression. It is founded on the assumption that openness and dialogue should be fostered to challenge unaccountable power.

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• The Workplace Bullying Institute is the sole United States organization dedicated to the eradication of workplace bullying through public education, help for individuals, employer solutions and legislative advocacy.